Office 2.0, the excellent conference that’s put on by my friend and tireless productivity maven Ismael Ghalimi has just announced that David Allen, the thought leader who developed the “Getting Things Done” productivity strategy will be helping open the event with Ismael.  The official announcement is over at Ismael’s own IT Redux site as is more information about the conference which takes place from September 3 through the 5th.

If you’re planning on attending you might want to register today as it’s the last day to take advantage of the early bird registration rate which is $100 off the standard price.  You might also wish to make your hotel reservations.  The St Regis - which is one of the most beautiful conference venues in the city - is not a cheap place to stay and Ismael has managed to secure some pretty amazing discounts for attendees.  This hotel tends to fill up quickly, however, so I suggest that you book a room now or risk having the either pay a great deal more or stay somewhere less convenient if you wait too long.

I’ve attended the previous two Office 2.0 conferences (and even moderated panels at both) and I have to tell you that in addition to being one of the most innovative conferences around, it is also one of the most interesting, thought provoking and enjoyable.  Hope to see you there!

Also, don’t forget that David and the rest of the David Allen Company team are hard at work putting together their own event, the GTD Global Summit which is scheduled for 11-13th of March of 2009.  Registration is also open for this event - and it’s one for which you might want to register well in advance as it is sure to fill up with a rather limited number of slots available for attendees.

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GTD asks us to do a lot of of writing. It encourages us to write as we brainstorm, even on a cocktail napkin if necessary. It suggests we identify next actions in writing, and it even recommends we carry around something to capture thoughts and To Do ideas (next actions & projects) with everywhere we go. If we’re going to do all this writing it might be worth reflecting a moment on why it’s so worthwhile to do.

The Limit

There’s a reason we have blackboards in classrooms, white boards in conference rooms and why I will go to great lengths to make sure I have a white board in any consulting room where I do coaching or therapy. You’ve likely heard of the famous 7 plus or minus 2  chunks of information that we’re able to hold in working memory at any one time. Because of the upper-limit to our cognitive capacities, our speaking and auditory capabilities top out at roughly one thread at a time. That’s it. One. That one thread can move more or less quickly, but we can’t speak in several parallel threads at once. We also can’t listen accurately to several conversations at once. We can switch back and forth among them rapidly and catch the gist of them, but it is rapid switching rather than really doing more that one at a time. Our limited working memory also sets the boundaries of the complexity of thoughts that we can hold in mind. That is unless we cheat a bit. Here are two major ways we can cheat and feel good about it:

Parallel Processing

Here is where the writing comes in. Writing acts as extra-somatic memory—memory that resides outside the body. Let’s say I have a client that is trying to figure out what might be causing her child’s tantrums. So I ask her to tell me about a specific instance, which is where we usually start. As she tells me about the tantrum I begin sketching out a diagram of what she’s describing up on the whiteboard. It might start out with the phrase “Zoo Tantrum” in the middle, circled. As she cites possible contributing factors, several lines begin jutting out, each with a another phrase, such as “overstimulated”; “low on food”; “feeling jealous” about what his sibling ordered for lunch that he wished he’d ordered; and even reasons like the child having a “temperament” that makes him more prone to irritability in stressful circumstances.

With the diagram on the board, my client is able to shuttle back and forth from each of those ideas to represent all of them mentally, sometimes side by side, sometimes one after another, creating a sort of parallel processing—representing several ideas virtually at once. Or at least quickly enough that they can all be juggled in rapid succession to make comparisons that it would not be possible to make nearly as quickly if we were limited only to talking about those same ideas. My clients often find looking at a diagram of their problem so compelling that they jump out of their seat, needing no invitation, and start adding to the diagram. It is almost as if they can’t stay seated because the power of the ideas being generated is just too much to merely talk about. So writing things down has an effect that is a lot like adding a giant chunk of RAM to your computer, and very inexpensive RAM at that, which enables a powerful kind of parallel processing.

Freeing up RAM, by Using Your Hard Drive for Storage

The next piece is more widely known, but still well worth looking our attention. Our 3 x 5 notecard, our Outlook plugin, or the note we take on our phone, all function as extra-somatic memory in a another important way. This sort of memory is a bit more like computer storage, such as your hard drive on your PC, or the storage space on your mp3 player. David Allen has made the following metaphor a centerpiece of GTD: Offload information from your mental RAM so that it is freed up for other tasks like creativity and flexible thinking. That notepad or hipster PDA  you’ve got in your purse is functioning as a hard drive. If you get the info out of your RAM and onto your hard drive, you don’t have to keep using up your valuable, much less available RAM space, your working memory, to keep the ideas represented. So if writing to enhance thinking was like artificially extending (remember we’re cheating here) your RAM capacity—how much brute RAM you have to work with; this storage idea is more like making sure not to clutter whatever capacity of RAM you have in the first place with information that could easily be kept somewhere else.

Well why can’t we just jot things down once we get home or just do so every once in a while? That is the brilliance of GTD’s admonition to practice “ubiquitous capture”, always having some way to record those thoughts immediately, by the bedside, in the car, at the grocery store. One of the first authors whose work I fell in love with used to practice exactly this skill of ubiquitous capture. John Steinbeck used to carry a small notepad with him everywhere he went, and furiously jotted down notes in all kinds of circumstances. He had even been known to interrupt a romantic interlude, yes, that’s what I mean, to jot down a thought or image that he didn’t want to lose. Now I don’t think you have to make ubiquitous capture quite that ubiquitous, but the sheer dedication that Steinbeck had to capturing valuable thoughts, I think, makes a memorable example. I’m sure his lover at the time found it memorable too. This is also a reminder that being really smart doesn’t obviate having to write things down. Brilliant people like Steinbeck know the value of cheating, and it actually enabled his brilliance to flower as it did.

So all those little ideas that you’ve got zipping around like so many gnats add up and clog up your RAM. Of course the actual functioning of the brain is more complex than our RAM analogy. The miscellaneous To Dos and responsibilities aren’t just taking up RAM, they actually require using up additional cognitive resources, for instance executive function, which Oliver Starr previously posted about, to shift our attention around like a spotlight onto what we’re trying to keep track of. But for our purposes, offloading those ideas and images immediately leaves you with only the single idea, “check my ‘trusted system’” to keep track of, rather than the myriad details we would have buzzing around otherwise.

Finally it is worth giving a nod to how much writing  has affected the lot of humankind. Most of the conveniences we have today would not be around if it weren’t for this special bit of extra-somatic memory, which science, much of art, and so many of our greatest achievements rest upon—and which we usually take for granted. And now that we’ve got access to this ability to cheat, not just with pen and ink, but with an array of digital devices as well; when we choose not to write it down, voice note it, etc we’re choosing to toss away a giant chunk of our exceedingly valuable RAM. So next time you do a little paper and pencil brainstorming, send yourself an email, or draw a diagram so you can understand something better; take a second to remember what those little tools are doing for you. That extra RAM is there for the taking. Grab extra RAM more often. It’s darn close to free.

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Even if I had everyone in my organization trained in GTD I couldn’t picture people at my office implementing it. Mainly because they didn’t have the tools ready and handy in front of them to actually collect and crank their personal widgets. So before I began the training process I went on a several months search to find the perfect set of tools to distribute to all the Senior Management of Vakil Housing.

What tools did everybody need?
Intray/In Basket: We needed An intray/in basket for collection. This was pretty simple to get.

A Personal Collection Pocket Collection tool:We designed a pretty neat one for ourselves. More details here.

Filing Cabinet: I was quite particular that the Filing Cabinet we purchase for everybody would be swivel distance away. We used the Mercury filing cabinet with regular Hanging Folders.

A Calendar or Diary:  Some used their mobile phones to store appointments but for most we got them a regular 2007 or 2008 Diary.

List-Management Tool: Finally we needed a system/tool for everybody to manage their Project & Action Lists. This is where I got stuck.

The List Management Tool we needed had to fit the following criteria:
- It had to be portable. Since most of the attendees would be from our Engineering Division or Marketing, they are required to go out of office for work. Hence a Desktop based system (such as Outlook) or Web Based system (such as Remember The Milk) would not work.

- Cost-effective. Yes, it had to be cheap. We were rolling this out throughout the organization. So that knocked out most Digital systems such as Blackberrys, Palms and Windows Based PDAs. (However, subsequently we did hand over Blackberry devices to certain Senior staff members).

- Flexible enough to add/remove Categories: Unlike a Digital System (Blackberrys, Outlook etc.) there’s no really neat & tidy way to adjust categories/sections/contexts in paper based systems. Most notebooks with dividers like so many of these don’t have tabs. If they do, like this one, they are fixed. So, the problem is that if for a particular Context Say @Calls you may not have too many entries, but you are stuck with the 50 or 100 pages that are below that particular Divider because you can’t adjust it.

Finally once again after months of hunting, one of our own employees presented me what seemed like the perfect GTD Tool for us. The Solo 5 subject Notebook:

What made this perfect is:
It’s quite portable, Not as big as a Box File

The Dividers are removable! This is such a boon because if you run out of space in one section, you can replace the divider in another place of the notebook and start another section. Or if you know you won’t make too much use of a particular section, you can adjust it so that there are not too many pages beneath it.

They’re very well microperforated, so the pages tear out quite neatly.

The 5 Dividers Cover most of the Categories required by GTD:

We can add additional sections/categories for additional lists with the help of these 3M Post-it Flags

After discovering this Brilliant GTD Tool, we bought one for all those undergoing GTD Training at our office and we could finally begin our GTD training sessions. How did we go about the training so that almost all Senior Managers at Vakil Housing understand Project & Next Action thoroughly as well as Bring their Inboxes to zero almost everyday?  Stay Tuned for the next post in this Series.

This is the third post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing.
Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.

Second Post:A Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization to Collect & Have a Mind Like Water.

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As an editor, one of my great pleasures of my work is getting the opportunity to work with other writers.  It’s even better when I get to introduce a fellow author to an audience that I am confident will find the new author’s work to be interesting, informative, useful and sometimes of profound personal relevance.  Such is the case with the author I’m introducing here today.  Please meet GTDtimes’ newest contributor Michael Gorsline, M.A.

Michael has spent the last 15 years helping parents, children and individuals make life more rewarding. He holds a masters degree in counseling psychology, and has a private practice called Enjoy Parenting Again, where he’s a Parent Coach and Child and Family Therapist. Beyond practicing parent coaching and family therapy, he assists parents and other clients in reducing stressor spillover from areas such as work, bill paying, and household management into the parts of their lives they enjoy most; their relationships and their passions. It goes without saying that road-tested GTD skills are what he draws on most frequently in this work. He is an avid reader in the areas of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Michael also does frequent speaking engagements, and is an avid blogger at Awareness  Connection. He lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon.

Michael will be writing primarily about the cognitive aspects of GTD as well as the ways in which the application of GTD principals can help families to work together more effectively, accomplish more in less time,  and as a result find more time to do the things they enjoy most of all.  I am pleased to welcome Michael to our distinguished list of GTDtimes contributors and hope that you’ll join me in welcoming Michael on board.  Be sure to check out his inaugural post: Life’s Second Task which will be posted to the site shortly.

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As a Parent Coach and Family Therapist I spend a lot of time helping people everything from troubleshooting how to get kids to bed, to how to help dinner time go smoothly, to how to give an effective timeout when it is needed.  I also help with teaching principles about relationships. For instance, how to share control  in areas where you don’t need it as parent so that when you really do need it, kids will be willing to follow your lead. I also help clients with common therapy related skills like developing a deeper understanding of themselves or learning some self-empathy skills. Parents get a lot out of these skills. These skills create profound changes in people’s lives, yet I discovered that there seems to be a ceiling that clients  bump up against,  limiting their growth as parents.

My supervisor in grad school, a very wise and seasoned psychologist, had a knack for capturing the essence of life and of therapy by dividing things into three “baskets”. Here was what became the most important of them to me:

We have Three Primary Tasks in Life. If we’re good at these three we are successful and happy. Here they are:

1) Get along

2) Get things done

3) Self-soothe (manage our emotions)

They sound really simple and straightforward, don’t they?  I find it amusing looking back that I had no idea as a graduate student that number two was the name of a program which was on the cusp of becoming huge and which I’d one day being blogging about.

A lot of what I did with parent coaching and family therapy boiled down to the first and the last, getting along, and self-soothing, as well as teaching kids to do those same two. Those are truly important.  And they are of course much more complex than they appear at first glance, otherwise we wouldn’t call them life tasks. What I’ve discovered over the years though is that when I do nothing but helping with getting along and self-soothing, many parents hit that ceiling I mentioned. That’s because helping them with getting things done was a gaping hole that I was missing.

Too many therapists focus exclusively, by the nature of their profession, on numbers 1 and 3. And they just expect that clients either do or do not know how to get things done. They just don’t really see getting things done-skills as a task they ought to help with. But much like there are parenting skills such as the art of sharing control that in retrospect look like just common sense, there are Getting Things Done skills that are the same. That’s how we know they’re powerful. They are effective, and once you know them and practice them you get an illusory “Hey I knew that all along” feeling. David Allen has a term for that. He calls it advanced common sense .  Social psychologists refer it as hindsight bias.

What I’ve found is that parents, and all my other clients, including kids struggling in school, benefit from learning the skills from number two basket, Getting Things Done. I’m glad to have stretched the therapy model a bit, as many other therapists are doing now, to incorporate coaching on Getting Things Done. Because I would sure hate to have missed the opportunity to see families push past that ceiling by offering practical, easy-to-use GTD skills for accomplishing life’s second, and too often, overlooked  task.

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Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University whose “last lecture” brought him to international prominence for his courage, his compassion and his humanity while facing a terminal illness.  If you haven’t seen his now famous lecture it is well worth the hour you’ll invest.  There are lessons there for all of us regardless of our age, health, gender, race, or economic status.  His talk reaches across all boundaries and is an eloquent example where a man with little time left to live nevertheless reminds each one of us that we owe it to ourselves, our loved ones and the world not to take a single day for granted because you never know how many days you might have left.

Even though I  never met Randy, his death hits me particularly hard as I am still personally dealing with unexpectedly losing my closest friend, Marc Orchant, just a few months ago.  It seems to me that Randy and Marc had a lot in common - no doubt they would have been friends and who knows, perhaps they have become friends in another world.  It seems a sad truth that the best of us are always taken away far too soon.  My heart goes out to those that Randy left behind I am sure the void must be vast although I am sure that Randy’s wife and children must feel enormous pride at the way Randy chose to handle this incredibly painful hand of cards (as he put it) that he was dealt.  Randy, like Marc, will be missed.

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Editor’s Note:  I’ve been working with Julie Ireland, one of David’s GTD Coaches and the other day she had me read this article that David wrote on the Three Fold Nature of Work.  I found it so interesting and relevant that I wanted to share it with the readers of GTDtimes.  Some of you may have seen this already but regardless, it is worth reading again; a thirty second investment that can pay big dividends when you put these concepts into action in your daily life.

davidco.com © 1998 to 2006 The David Allen Company

Why do people complain that there’s no time to get work done?

Many times clients express frustration that they “can’t get any of their work done” because of the overwhelming
amount of interruptions, email, and other input that show up during the course of a normal day.  If you are ever in that frustrated state, it might help to understand the three-fold nature of what constitutes your “work.”

Why do people complain that there’s no time to get work done?

Many times clients express frustration that they “can’t get any of their work done” because of the overwhelming
amount of interruptions, email, and other input that show up during the course of a normal day.  If you are ever in
that frustrated state, it might help to understand the three-fold nature of what constitutes your “work.”

You are doing three things when you work:

(1) Doing pre-defined work.

This is what you would be doing all day if you got no input or interruptions of any sort.You would probably be working off the inventory of actions and projects that you came in with – work that you have  already determined needs doing.  The phone calls you need to make, the documents you need to draft, the ideas you need to outline on the project, etc.

(2) Doing work as it appears.

The phone rings, you take the call, and spend twenty minutes talking to a customer or a business colleague.  Your boss calls a half hour meeting to update you on a new development and get your input on it. You are doing the work as it shows up to be done.  You are actually defining your work rapidly in this case, and choosing to do the new stuff instead of any of the pre-determined activity.

(3) Defining work to be done.

This is processing your in-basket, your email, your meeting notes, etc. –taking in input and making decisions about what needs to be done about it.  You may do some quick actions as you define them, and you will probably be adding some more to your inventory of defined work.  So what?  (All this is common sense.)  Well, I have noticed that many people act as if (2) is some sort of burden to endure, and (3) is some irrelevant activity aside from their work.  I don’t get it.  It’s all the work.  Some is done when it
appears, and some is done when you choose to do it instead of what’s showing up.  And processing input is required to trust the inventory of pre-defined work.
How much of which kind of work to do when is the eternal dance of the workday.  You can’t really do more than one of them at a time, though you can get really fast with processing work while you’re on hold on the phone, and waiting for meetings to start.  There may be interruptions that are allowed that are not functional or valuable, but
managing those is just tactical to your definition of your job. It’s an eternal challenge of allocating limited resources (management) – it’s not an inherent problem.

Get used to it.

What lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
- Aristotle

–

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Late last week I had the opportunity to interview Shai Berger, the CEO and Founder of a new company called Fonolo (Phone-Oh-Low) that I think you’re going to like as much as I do.  Fonolo solves a problem that we all have, is something that is almost universally hated and which we all thought, up until now, was an evil that simply must be endured.  The endless misery dished out at the hands of IVR systems all over the planet.

For those of you that haven’t heard the term IVR,  it’s an acronym for Interactive Voice Response - in other words it’s one of those pesky systems that answers your calls when you call just about any large company.  Usually you’re greeted with the statement, “please listen carefully as our menu options have changed…” or else (and especially if you’re calling from California) “If your language preference is English, please press one now. Si su preferencia de la lengua es español, ahora presione por favor dos.”
What follows is a list of options and the buttons you need to press in order to navigate to the place in their system where you can actually accomplish the task you had called to do in the first place.

Any adult in the modern world has spent countless frustrating hours, usually enhanced by some mind numbing muzak or even worse a promotional jingle on a repeating loop while attempting to get the help or service you needed when placing the call.  I don’t know what the total time lost to US workers each year is while we struggle through these IVRs but I’m certain the time loss would run into the hundreds of millions if not more.  But hey, there’s some good news.  Especially if you loathe IVR systems as much as I do then I think  Fonolo is going to be your new best friend.

The way it works is actually quite simple.  Instead of calling the company and entering IVR purgatory, you go to Fonolo and find the company in their index (they are adding new companies all the time - in fact, this is one of their competitive insulators, the number of IVR systems that they have already identified and mapped).  When you locate the company you want, you are presented with a visual map of the IVR system.

Simply scan down the map (an example of such a map is on the right) until you see the location where you need to go and click the button on that location.  Fonolo will now place a call, do the navigating and waiting for you and then ring your phone once it has reached the location in the IVR system that you had previously specified. No more grinding your teeth while listening to endless menus and muzak, no more wasted time when you could have been doing something more interesting or productive either.

The only thing that is going to be frustrating now is the wait while Fonolo indexes the millions of IVR systems that popluate our world.  You see, while the concept is simple and the UI is intuitive, the process behind the scenes is incredibly difficult.  Imagine the work required to identify each segment of every IVR, program a computer to enter the correct tones at the correct time and then to know when it has arrived at the desired location so it can call you.

Plus there’s the added burden for Fonolo of keeping current as companies modify their IVR systems as they grow and change.  This is an absolutely massive undertaking - not one for the faint of heart CEO that is for certain.

There are lots of ways that Fonolo can make money - most of which don’t include charging the end user - although don’t be surprised if Fonolo rolls out with some carriers and then those carriers promote the service in some white labeled format and charge you for the privilege of using something that the company is currently giving away for free.

I really like this concept.  It’s original, useful, well thought out and absolutely something that I will use myself.  It’s also the sort of thing that reminds me why I like writing about applications.  Even though there are so many companies creating software right now, there are still a ton of new and/or better ways of doing things that are just waiting for an enterprising individual with a vision and the desire to see it through.

Fonolo is just such a company - one you should definitely add to  your list of time saving tools that you have to check out.

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Hey, everyone, I’m currently streaming the “What is Greentech?” session at AlwaysOn come check it out here.

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Have you ever stopped to think about how many different places you now have to keep track of online?  Credit Card accounts, Banking, Stocks, PayPal, Ebay, MySpace, Flickr and the list goes on and on and on…  Entire business models have been based simply upon keeping track of your passwords for all these sites but what no one has done is create a one-stop interface that lets you keep tabs on all the sites I’ve mentioned above plus dozens more from a single URL and with just one log-in.  At least no one until now.

PageOnce is a start-up that does exactly what I’ve just described.  The initial sign-up process takes just a few steps and once you’ve verified your the owner of the email address you’ve registered the web application starts walking you through adding all your accounts a sector at a time until you have filled out a surprising amount of real estate that does a pretty exceptional job of summarizing your online life on one page with one log in.

I spent a few minutes this evening speaking with PageOnce founders Guy Goldstein, CEO and Ahikam Kaufman, COO about their new application and equally exciting, their about to be released iPhone application, iOnce which should be available via the iPhone application store later this week.   I got to take a look at their new iPhone application and it’s every bit as slick as their online version.  This is a well thought out, intuitive and very easy to use application - figuring out what to do is definitely not a challenge and in only a few minutes you’ve consolidated your online life into one place.

Of course the big question you have to be asking here is what about security… and to be sure that’s the first thing that crossed my mind - especially when you’ve got all this information accessible on a mobile phone.  What, I asked, if you lose your phone?

Guy explained to me that it’s not quite as potentially injurious as it might seem.  That’s because the application doesn’t actually provide full blown access to all these accounts, just a window into them so that you can see what is happening with each.

In other words, if you lose your phone your finances aren’t in immediate danger but those nude photos you were hiding in your flickr account might be the subject of some viewing you hadn’t intended.  More over you can contact PageOnce and disable access to your account in the event that it has been compromised - althought you’re probably going to want to notify your bank and credit card companies just in case someone wrote down account information.

During my talk with Guy and Ahikam, I actually realized that they have a couple of interesting opportunities related to security and fraud prevention.  First, I suggested that they should offer an upgraded service that provides wallet protection for a fee.  Since you’re registering all these accounts anyway, why not have PageOnce contact your credit card companies and other service providers if your wallet gets lost or stolen?  Or have PageOnce be a one-stop-notification service to update all your providers that you’ve got a new address?  I’d pay for such convenience and I’ll bet a lot of other people would too.

The other area where PageOnce may have a big opportunity is with the credit card companies providing anti-fraud services.  After all, by putting consumers in much closer contact with what is happening on each of their accounts, we’re a lot more likely to notice an unexpected charge and take quick action before a thief manages to rack up some really damaging charges.

This is one of those ideas where as soon as you see it you say to yourself why didn’t I think of this?  I know I did.  All I can say is that I’m glad that someone was finally smart enough to make my life a little easier - PageOnce - as far as I’m concerned it’s a winner that will help you and me both get a few more things done every day.

Here’s a look at the PageOnce interface once you’ve set up a few accounts:

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